Mount Kimbie - Crooks and Lovers


Mount Kimbie, alongside acts like Burial, Joy Orbison & James Blake, are the torchbearers of the dubstep community. Their much-hyped debut album Crooks & Lovers finally landed this year, and while I was originally sceptical, I eventually decided to check it out, and what followed is best described as sonic euphoria. While I called them dubstep torchbearers, classifying this duo as dubstep is perhaps to cluster them in with a genre that is for the most part associated with foreboding, bass-heavy rhythms that speak for the seedy underbelly of the UK. Mount Kimbie's sound eschews the brooding for the effervescent, and while they don't cut back on heavy bass, they still take their music in a direction that is more celebratory than the lamentations of Burial's Untrue or Joy Orbison's The Shrew Would Have Cushioned The Blow. So do yourselves and check out this album; it's a good length (35 minutes), so even if you aren't the biggest dubstep fan it won't last so long as to bore you, and it perhaps signals a new direction for dubstep, away from the gloomy Bristol scene toward a more triumphant, bombastic aesthetic that seems to be gaining currency within indie circles today.

8.6

2 comments:

dig deep August 5, 2010 at 5:09 PM  

Hey! Gloomy Bristol? Joker, Peverelist, The Flatmates, Adam Hart-Davies, Johnny Morris, Lawrence Hill...come on.

Rage August 11, 2010 at 6:20 AM  

Apologies. I'll be the first to admit that my knowledge of dubstep is pretty arbitrary, and limited. A lot of the stuff I've heard that's attributed to the Bristol scene and its off-shoots tend to be quite brooding. I won't pretend to be an expert on dubstep mate you probably know a lot more than me. Appreciate the comment though and keep 'em coming if you disagree (or agree) with anything I happen to post/say.

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